


Clarifications

by Sonora



Series: Love Bites 'verse [6]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Succubi & Incubi, Dirty Talk, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, First Time Bottoming, M/M, Mind Manipulation, Multi, Negotiations, Post-Manila, Self-Discovery, Sexual Identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-29
Packaged: 2018-03-26 03:38:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3835588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sonora/pseuds/Sonora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Herc's having a bit of a crisis about his sexual identity and asks Yancy to give him a hand.  Yancy does what he figures has to be done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I... can't even try to justify this series or this story. I'm not even going to try. This has to be the dirtiest angst I've ever written.
> 
> I'm also pretty certain that Yancy wants to talk all sweet and loving to Herc here, but doesn't really know how. He's trying, but the poor boy only seems to be able to talk in obscenities when it comes to fucking. He's got some personal shit going on in his own head, but it's all kind of sad... this was supposed to be happy porn, argh.

Herc’s not real sure anymore how they got up here. How they got like this. Naked on a hotel bed in the part of Manila that wasn’t fucking destroyed, legs tangled up and lips locked, spit and sweat coating every bare centimeter of skin. Yancy’s wings are out, bigger and wider than Chuck’s, a sort of steel blue where Chuck’s are pale red. 

Herc’s trying to focus on that.

Yancy’s wings.

Anything but Yancy’s hard, strong body, tucked between the vee of his legs. Anything but Yancy’s dick, fat against his own flaccid length. The way Yancy is making the happiest little sounds as Herc shoves his tongue into the boy’s mouth, like the boy’s fucking dying for this, and it’s only hunger after today’s battle, Herc tells himself. That’s all it is. That’s all.

He slides a hand across the soft fur of Yancy’s wings. They’re almost the color of Gipsy Danger’s hull.

Almost...

“You doin’ okay there?” Yancy pants, breaking the kiss, hands a soothing weight in Herc’s hair, somehow the only part of him that’s not a threat right now. “Baby?”

The question’s been asked, and the tenuous moment’s been breached. Herc just grunts in response and pushes, Yancy obliging by rolling off as Herc sits up. He rubs both hands across the stubble of his jaw, the prickling sensation bringing him back to himself.

To who he is.

Which is not this.

Not this at all.

“Herc?” Yancy presses. Mercy of mercy, he keeps his hands - and his pet names - to himself.

“ ‘M fine,” Herc replies, standing now, pacing away from the bed. 

Outside the penthouse, Manila is stretched out in all its ruined glory. Parts of it are on fire, others dark, but lights still dance from hundreds of structures that went untouched. It was a good kill today, nice and clean - as clean as a kill in a high-density metro area can be, at any rate, and Striker's first at that - and while the clean-up crews work, the rest of the city is partying away. Everybody out there, just relieved to be alive. Chuck went out with Raleigh, eager to spend some time with his brother and Raleigh eager for some international dining.

His boy. His boy, out there, where he can’t see his father humiliating himself. Failing. Again.

Herc leans against the cool glass, letting its smooth surface suck some of the heat from his body.

“Far be it from me to point out the obvious,” Yancy says, padding over next to him, tail curled over the crook of his elbow, “but you’re not fine.”

“Give me a minute, son,” Herc replies, and wishes he could find the energy to kick the boy out of his room.

Yancy’s quiet for a moment. “That’s just the problem though, isn’t it?”

“What?”

Yancy’s back hits the glass, and Herc can’t escape his eyes. “I’m not your son.”

“Yance...”

“I know, I know, you don’t want me to use any of this,” and Yancy makes a little jazz-hands gesture, “but it’ll help.”

“No.” Herc shakes his head. “No, we do this straight up or we don’t do this at all. Won’t live my life like that.”

“Then what about Chuck?”

There’s an accusatory note in Yancy’s words, and it is exactly the thing Herc does not need right now. “What do you mean?”

“What about Chuck? You don’t want him popping your cherry, so you ask me to do it. You ask me to stop, I don’t do it. So what?” Yancy’s tail prods his ass. “You gonna let him up in here? Or maybe you go get a real whore and who cares?”

He doesn’t miss the jab. “Nobody is talking about whores, Yancy.”

“I am an ex-stripper,” Yancy says, and he’s smiling again, and wait, that’s worse than the anger. 

Herc sighs. “Why is this so fucking difficult?” he grumbles to himself.

“Because you can’t think about yourself as a gay man,” Yancy replies. “Or bisexual, which, as I’ve told you multiple times...”

“Everybody’s bisexual, yeah, you’ve said it, mate.”

“Yeah well, it’s true, that’s why I say it. It’s all bullshit. Just let it go.”

“You don’t know a goddamn thing about humans,” Herc snaps, more irritated at himself than Yancy. This... he hates this.

The last few months haven’t been easy. But Chuck talks to the Beckets regularly now, and he’s starting to get his senses back under him, and that Azazel’s Guide book says he’s on the tail end of this newborn period, which will be nice. Boy isn’t as mindless anymore when he’s hungry. But he’s starting to push for other things. 

Things Herc hasn’t been able to say yes to.

Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Herc’s not sure what happens to them next. If they’re going to survive it when Chuck starts going elsewhere for sustenance because his old man can’t give him everything he needs. The drift’s been a huge help, but if anything’s rebuilt their relationship - albeit it in a rather warped form - it’s been the sex.

And if the last few months have taught Herc anything, it’s that he’s desperately missed being a father. He loves Chuck so much it hurts. If the sex stops, if they go back to what they were before...

“You’re already fucking Chuck, Herc. You seem to enjoy it,” Yancy points out, in the most unhelpful manner possible. “What possible difference can a little change of position make at this point?”

Herc just stares at him, the smiling sex demon with the mussed-up hair.

How is he supposed to explain it? To Yancy, who doesn’t have any idea what it’s like to be human and have shame, or orientation, or any of that shit? How it feels to be sleeping with his son, his only child, because he has to? To love the boy, love _touching_ the boy, so deeply and yet find it so hard to find him beautiful, even though he is? To enjoy it and hate himself for it, part of his mind still recoiling at the thought of being with another male? To close his eyes sometimes and still find himself thinking about women, to have to hide all that from Chuck in the drift? To wonder if somebody, you’re not going to be strong enough to keep doing it, to escape to some girl, pussy, and never come back? To have this somehow being the one thing, the one single thing, that’s all he’s got left of who he’s always been?

And this? No. Herc can’t do this. 

He can’t.

But no sooner does he open his mouth to let Yancy know, tell him to go get dinner somewhere else tonight, that tail touches his lips, closing them again.

“You’re doing this for Chuck, right?” Yancy says gently. “You can’t get hard for me but you can for him. You love him. I know you do.”

Herc pushes his tail away. “Take no for an answer, Yance.”

“Hey,” Yancy says, hand on Herc’s shoulder, “you’re the one who offered. Dinner for helping you fix your little problem. But I can get dinner from anyone and you can get sex anywhere. So why me?”

“Let it go.”

“You trust me that much? Or you think you should be able to get hard for me cause I’m an incubus?” Yancy grins, wide and easy, and Herc hates him for how simple this all is for him. “Or maybe you just like me. Maybe you think I’m pretty.”

“You’re here, I need to do this for Chuck, that’s it, that’s all I fucking care about,” Herc snaps, just wanting him to go away and leave him to sort this thing out in his own head. “Stop reading so goddamn much into everything.”

“Herc...”

“This is not about you, Becket!”

Yancy wavers for a second, before beaming even more. He hooks a leg around Herc’s and turns them around, so it’s Herc with his back to the glass, Yancy’s hands on either side of him, holding him there.

“No, it’s about you. And you need to be looking at this closer, Herc,” Yancy murmurs, mouth so close to Herc’s ear the older pilot can feel his breath. “You need to really unpack this all and look at it, because I don’t think you’re as straight as you say you are.”

“I am. Angela...”

“You loved Angela, I know,” Yancy continues, and his voice is suddenly the most soothing thing in the world. “But you can’t hide anything from me, Herc. All your sexy thoughts, all your secret desires, I can see them all. I can taste them.” He presses the softest kiss to the soft skin of Herc’s jaw, and Herc shivers. “You loved Angela so much, but you were so relieved, weren’t you, when you fell in love with her?”

Herc tries to protest that - because Yancy’s wrong, he’s not gay, he’s just not - but he can’t. Yancy’s actually not wrong about that. Meeting Angela was a huge relief. She was a gorgeous girl and she loved him from the first. She was the embodiment of everything he’d joined the Air Force for, a way out of his shitty little Outback town, away from his dad and dad’s belt, a chance for a normal life, kids, escape... escape from...

“Yeah, you were running, weren’t you?” Yancy says.

“My dad was an arsehole.”

“It was more than that.” Yancy lifts Herc’s chin, so they’re looking right into each other’s eyes. He’s got very blue eyes, old eyes, the color of the deep ice at the heart of a glacier, cool and soothing, and Herc could just sink into them. Let go, and sink. “When you met Angela, you thought you didn’t have to be what you really are. You thought you were cured.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Herc protests, but he can’t put too much force into it. It was five hour fight today, fourteen hours in the drift, including transit, and he’s suddenly exhausted. All the emotion finally out, all the anger and doubt and worry, he’s just exhausted. 

It’s over now. He doesn’t have to fight it. He’s done trying to figure this out. Yancy’s going to tell him.

Yancy’s going to help him.

“That’s right,” Yancy soothes, hands, cold from the glass, slide around his face. “There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with being gay.”

“I’m not... I’m not...” Herc tries to tell him, but the words are broken by a yawn.

“Tell me Angela wasn’t the only woman you’ve ever loved,” Yancy says, so gentle, and Herc’s grateful for how close their bodies are right now, how the younger Ranger is practically holding him up. He can barely stand on his own. It’s nice to be able to lean on another man. Let himself be vulnerable, without being worried about Chuck or the world or anything else. “Tell me you never looked at her, with her short hair and firm tits and long legs, and saw something else. Tell me, that time you jokingly asked her for anal and she gave it to you, that that wasn’t the hardest you ever came with her.”

Herc tries to protest, because Angie never... but she did, didn’t she? She did. A few months before Chuck was conceived. Hell, she loved it, loved it almost as much as their boy loves it, taking it up the ass, all tears and happy smiles when they were done, but it was the act itself that did it for Herc. His hands on her spine, the milky skin of her back arching, pumping in and out of her hole, her lean body so like...

She did look rather boyish.

She did.

“That doesn’t mean I’m gay,” Herc whispers, trying to push away, but stumbles the second he escapes Yancy’s hold.

“I know,” Yancy tells him, so understanding, and helps him up, helps him over to the bed. “But it was good for you, so good for you, because it reminded you of all the things you’d had to leave behind when you married her, all the things you never really got to feel. Like that boy you liked in school. Remember him? What was his name? That cute brunette friend of yours?”

“Rob Oliver?” Herc asks as he sits down, confused. Rob was just a good mate, another boy on the after school rugby team, just a friend, a year ahead of him in school, and Herc tries to tell Yancy that.

But Yancy just smiles and lays him down and cuddles up with him, and reminds him of how it really was.

Rob wasn’t just a friend. He was Herc’s first handjob, a fumbling thing in the locker room that had led to more and more, until Rob went off to uni and left Herc behind. Just like handsome Mr. Winters, his algebra teacher, hadn’t just taught him maths but also been his first crush. Or how Bobby had been his first kiss, sweet Bobby who’d gotten ripped off his bed and thrown out of the house by Herc’s father. 

The military. How hard boot camp had been, those open-bay showers with some many naked, gorgeous boys around him, desperate to not pop a boner in the middle of it all. What a struggle the military had been, trying to hide what he felt and who he wanted, afraid he’d be ostracized if anyone knew. How deployments had been these terrifying things, blowjobs traded behind tents with the Yanks or the Danes, how every once in while, they’d found their way to a cot, but how hard it had been for Herc to admit to wanting anything, to open himself enough for that one last step. How it had actually been Yancy and Raleigh he’d fucked at the strip club in Anchorage - something that gets both of them laughing.

“You wanted it,” Yancy says sheepishly, “but I wasn’t sure you knew it. So I made sure you just remembered me as Jazmine.”

Herc kisses his forehead. 

It’s nice, remembering things the right way.

Even the ugliest of things, Yancy helps him talk through. Like how things had started falling apart with Angie, towards the end. How she’d almost caught him with Stacker, that time Stacker came to visit. How they’d only stayed together for Chuck, how love hadn’t been enough to bridge the gap, how he’d never really been able to move past some subtle aversion to her body to make love to her the way she deserved. 

How all this repression had started. How Herc’s father used to beat him, beat him all the time, but not just because he came home late or Scott got in trouble at school. No, those beatings weren’t just about that, they were about the old bastard trying to...

He can hear it

“He didn’t want me to be gay,” Herc realizes brokenly, Yancy rubbing his back, what feels like hours later. His cheeks are wet, but not even for Yancy, will Herc admit he was crying. “He was trying to beat the gay out.”

“That’s right,” Yancy replies in a wavering voice, and there are tears in his own eyes, when Herc looks back up at him. “That’s right, Herc. All of that, you’re right. I’m sorry I have to d-drag you through it, but... I don’t blame you for not remembering. It must have been so awful, your dad rejecting you like that, hurting you for what you were.”

Herc closes his eyes, trying to keep the stinging away. “I had to forget...”

“But you can remember now,” Yancy continues, hands stroking his bare shoulders. “You have to, and you’re so brave, facing it finally, facing it for Chuck.”

The thought of Chuck brings warmth back to his heart. “My pretty boy.”

“Yeah, he’s so pretty. And he loves you so much.”

“I know. I love him,” Herc says, and closes his eyes. Breathes for a little while. 

Feels like he’s been dragged under the roar of a tsunami, rubbed raw on the ocean floor.

Feels good to be quiet. 

Until Yancy starts rubbing his shoulder again.

"You okay?" Boy sounds nervous.  "Kind of went quiet on me there for a minute."  
   
"Fine," Herc says, and he doesn't have to wipe some stray moisture out of his eyes, not at all.  "I'm fine."  
   
"You sure?  I mean, that was a lot to take in, so if you'd be more comfortable with me leav- oh."  
   
Herc rolls up, so they're chest to chest, the smooth expanse of Yancy's firm muscles laid out beneath him.  Yancy falls silent while Herc takes him in, quiet.  Still.  The boy _looks_ nervous. Very nervous, like he's done something bad, and Herc's got no idea what's he's thinking, because what could possibly be wrong at a time like this?   
   
A small sliver of the old, unwanted disgust bubbles up in him, as he shifts his weight, runs a hand down Yancy's perfect skin.  But it's okay now.  _It's okay,_ Herc tells himself.  Almost forty years of getting it wrong, hating himself for this stupidly simple thing, and it's over.  
   
It's finally over.  
   
For the first time, Herc knows what he wants.  How he wants it. Knows that he can want it.   
   
And the boy beneath him - incubus or not - is beautiful. Willing. So strong.  
   
Herc’s nerves finally settle.  It all settles.  
   
He can do this.  He wants to do this.  
   
"Herc," Yancy says,, almost plaintive.  "Herc, look.  I'm sorry about..."  
   
"Shut up," Herc tells him with a small, fond chuckle, and kisses him.  
   
It takes Yancy a little while to respond, but that's okay.  Chuck's always too hungry to do anything but go straight for the finale, and Herc - embarrassing as it is to think about now - has been too ashamed to linger.  To rev his boy up, send sparks under his skin.  He's never just explored another man, not in any of those anonymous encounters he can hate himself for later, and Yancy had offered, hadn't he?  
   
It's okay.  
   
Herc licks into Yancy's mouth, sliding his legs around the younger man's creamy thighs, mounting him.  Gives him plenty of space to work with, to kiss his way down Yancy's body and back up, mapping every little bit of that incubus topology with lips and tongue and fingers.  He used to do this with Angie, knew every bit of her, but the combination of the thrill of being with a man, finally, and it being Yancy Becket, the older half of his favorite blond demon jaeger crew, just makes it that much better.  
   
Makes everything better.  
   
"You taste so good," Herc murmurs, coming back up to kiss him, fingers rolling one of Yancy's hard little nipples.  
   
"I'm supposed to."  Yancy shudders, eyes closed and head fallen back.  "It's just what I am."  
   
Herc laughs.  It's amazing, feeling this light, this free.  "What you are is gorgeous."  
   
"Herc... oh, fuck..."  
   
"What is it?"  He bites Yancy's ear, tasting sweat, and licks behind there too. "What do you need?"  
   
Yancy's hands circle Herc's waist, fingers digging into the fat of his thighs.  "That's my line."  
   
“Shut up,” Herc tells him again.

This time, Yancy starts chuckling right along with him.

Somehow they end up with Herc on the bottom, on his stomach, more play-wrestling than anything else, rumpling up the king-sized bed, turning its crisp white solidity into a nest of sheets and pillows. Yancy leans over him, kissing his shoulders, murmuring soft advice that Herc can’t quite hear over the pounding in his ears.

They’re going to do this. They’re really going to do this.

“No hypno shit,” he sighs, as Yancy tells him to lift his hips. “None, you got it? I want to feel this for what it is, whatever it is.”

“Of course.” 

He turns to look at the boy. Yancy’s got his incubus body on; wings, tail, fangs, horns. It should make him look... well, it shouldn’t make him look as sexy as it does. Sure, Chuck’s got the same features, but his only serve to enhance that natural cuteness he’s got, highlighting the fact he’s in his awkward teenage years. Yancy, on the other hand, is all raw male power, quiet strength and subtle authority 

Yancy’s also hard, dripping, but not just from his red-swollen cockhead; that natural slick is running down the inside of his thighs. His face is flushed. His voice is wavering from the effort of keeping himself under control, and Herc can’t help but feel smug. 

He’s doing that to Yancy Becket, golden boy of the PPDC. Yancy Becket wants to fuck his broken-down old ass. 

“I’m not gonna push you. No tricks. Just my cock in your tight virgin ass. How’s that sound?”

“Lovely,” Herc agrees, and cants up, into Yancy’s light touch. The boy’s hands shake as they come to rest on Herc’s goose-pimpled flesh. “C’mon Becket, get the fuck on with it.”

Yancy laughs - genuinely laughs, for the first time that night - and wipes a hand up between his balls. Herc realizes with a shiver that Yancy’s going to fuck him like that, his own slick for lube. “Eager, are we?”

“Let’s just get this over with, shall we?”

“It’s not that bad, Herc. It doesn’t hurt. Feels goddamn good, if I do it right.” Yancy settles down over his haunches, pressing his thumb right against Herc’s hole, following it with a kiss. “And I always do it right.”

Herc scrunches a pillow to his chest. “I’m not normally...”

“Neither am I. It’s okay.”

He looks back at the incubus again. Yancy’s bare ass is in the air, tail waving. Herc can feel those twisted little horns sliding up - now, down - his back. “What about the normal line, how it’s human to have preferences?”

“Hey, you’ve got your favorite flavor of ice cream, I like the taste of orgasms achieved a certain way,” and something wet, warm, slides across Herc’s hole. “I can dig it.”

“What are you...” Herc begins, and then moans - goddammit, Yancy’s _rimming_ him. “Holy shit.”

“I ain’t much for sweet talk, but you taste really good.”

“That’s... shit, oh god...”

“God’s not doing this to you,” Yancy murmurs, and a slick finger replaces his tongue, blunt pressure against that puckered ring of muscle. “I am.”

“So shut up and get on.”

And shut up and get on it, the kid does.

The kid really does.

The rim job gets deeper, Yancy’s tongue probing down through that ring of muscle, burning hot inside of him. The sensation of stretching, fullness, only grows as Yancy starts alternating his tongue with his fingers, with his tail, the rounded head of in popping through and flexing in a way that absolutely should not be so goddamn amazing, corkscrewing deeper and deeper yet.

And that’s not to say anything about the steady stream of filth pouring out of the boy’s mouth when he pulls off.

“You feel so good, stuffed up with my fingers, your hungry little hole just gobbling it up... think you can take two fingers, next to my tail... of course you can, cause I fucked you like this, the first night we met, with my tail... you came so hard, came so hard on my tail, I was licking cum out of Raleigh’s hair for hours after that, such a good fuck Herc, you’re such a good fuck... fuck, I could just sit back here and make our with your asshole for hours...”

It’s oddly endearing, and insanely hot, and Herc’s both rock hard and laughing by the time Yancy tells him that he’s ready. He tries to turn around, wants to see his boy’s face as they do this, but a hand catches his elbow before he can flip himself over.

“Easier, Herc, it’s easier on your back, first time,” Yancy says softly. “I’ll get you a plug, let you loosen up a little for when Chuck comes back.”

And the thought of Yancy plugging him up...

“Fuck,” he groans, and settles back down.

Doesn’t hurt, as much as he feared it would, when Yancy pushes into him. Should be climatic, somehow, but it’s not. It’s good, but it’s not a revelation or anything like that. Easy, really, and Herc sighs, body relaxing even as Yancy sinks into him. Bottoms out. Waits for a moment to let Herc adjust, he says.

Yancy says so many good things.

“Chuck’s gonna love this,” Yancy whispers as he starts moving, draping himself over Herc’s back, the angle of his cock shifting, pressing against all sorts of lovely things, and his tail presses back in, filling Herc to bursting. The older Ranger can’t do anything but clutch at the sheets and _feel_. “Chuck’s going to love how hot and tight his daddy is, how much his daddy loves him, how much his daddy is willing to do for him. He’s going to mount you and fuck you and you’re going to come so hard.” Yancy punctuates this by setting off an explosion inside Herc, tail hitting the nub of his prostate, and Herc doesn’t recognize the noise he makes. “He loves you so much Herc, you’re such a good daddy, come on, be a good daddy for Chuck, come for him, come on, come on my cock, empty those big tight repressed balls of yours all over the goddamn fancy sheets...”

It doesn’t take long.

Not with the way Yancy is punishing his ass, tail practically punching his prostate in between thrusts of his cock, no relief from the pleasure, the pain, no way to distinguish between the two at all. He doesn’t feel like himself at all, like he’s lifting out of his body, watching this from afar, like this is a stranger and not him at all and shit, he’s not...

Yancy digs his nails into Herc’s thigh. 

“Don’t you dare even think about it, you fucking asshole. Accept this, accept you’re gay, and _come_ ,” he orders, growling so forcefully Herc can’t help but obey.

He comes.

With Chuck's name on his lips, harder than he ever has in his life, white fire exploding out behind his eyes as four decades of heterosexuality burns to ash, and it feels... oh god, it _feels_.  
   
There aren't even words for it.  Not in this language or any other.  
   
Or maybe his brain's just melted out of his ears.  
   
Yancy leans over him again, that lovely weight of him settling like it belongs. He whispers something like "I'm going to get a washcloth, hang on," and Herc's just aware enough to think it strange.  Chuck always likes to clean things up with his tongue, but maybe it's cause it's Yancy's own that he's not going that route.  
   
Doesn't really matter.  
   
Herc closes his eyes, luxuriating in the pile of pillows, lost in the static.

Everything’s perfect. Everything’s quiet and still and whole and...  
   
Until he hears it.  
   
"Holy shit..."  
   
"Daddy?"  
   
Herc can't move, every muscle in his body seemingly shut down for the time being, but he doesn't need to raise his head to know who that is.  He can only imagine what he might look like, what Chuck and Raleigh are seeing, with his well-used body sprawled out on the bed, Yancy's semen dripping out of his ass.   
   
He chuckles - he feels too good to be embarrassed right now, he's done with being embarrassed over this shit - and holds out a hand.  "C'mere, boys.  Come to Daddy."  
   
Chuck's there in a flash, scrambling up on the bed next to him, fingers automatically dipping down to his hole, an almost giddy realization in his eyes.  And he doesn't even ask, just starts tearing his clothes off.  
   
Herc just rolls over onto his back, watching with contented, satiated eyes, and yawns into the crook of his elbow.  Raleigh, on the other side, smiles at him and leans in to offer a kiss Herc gladly takes.  
   
Sometimes? Sometimes life is really good.  
   
Yancy doesn't come back out of the bathroom though, not for a while.  Not until Raleigh's stripped down too and sprouted a cock, little and cute, lapping up his brother’s cum. Not until Chuck’s slotted up in between Herc's spread legs and drilled deep inside of him. Raleigh’s offering advice to Chuck and Chuck tossing back obscenities as the two of them trade off kissing Herc for kissing each other for more banter.  
   
"Hey Yancy," Raleigh says, smiling at his older brother, who's wearing a mini-skirt and breasts now, every trace of his handsome features obscured behind the glamour of some dark-haired Eurasian shelia.  "Going out?"  
   
Yancy just rolls a shoulder, the side that caught some new circuitry burns today, except he's all wrong right now, all wrong.  Herc vaguely wonders how he ever looked at a form like that, aesthetically perfect though it might be, with lust in his heart.  
   
"Yeah, kiddo," he says, flashing a big smile through the pale pink lipstick he's wearing. "Kind of hungry."  
   
Herc holds Chuck still for a moment.  "Didn't you get enough?"  
   
"What?  Huh?  Oh, right."  Yancy scratches that long silky hair.  "I, umm, I let you feel all of that, Herc.  Didn't seem right, taking any of it, not when... you only get one first time, you know?"  
   
"Should have waited for me," Chuck grumbles.  
   
"Shush, baby, you've got your turn," Herc chides, and Chuck just grins again.  Goddamn adorable, his boy is.  He looks back up at Yancy.  "Sure you don't want to stay?  I can handle another, I think."  
   
"Naw, let the boys have it," Yancy says lightly and adjusts his boobs in his bra.   
   
Herc tries to say goodbye, but Raleigh just snuggles closer and captures his mouth again, Chuck rolling his hips at the same time, cock hitting his prostate with deadly accuracy.  Pleasure bursting in his brain, Herc casts one last glance at Yancy, whose mood is impossible to determine behind that flawless facade, and waves to him instead.  
   
"Goodbye, Herc," Yancy calls, sounding somewhat wistful, and then he's gone.

Herc doesn’t think too much about it.

Nothing’s wrong. How could anything possibly be wrong?  
 

+++++

    
Herc doesn't think too much of it the next morning, either.  
   
Except Yancy doesn't show up.  
   
And he doesn't show up the next night, either, nor the next, nor any of the five days they're stuck in that resort while Stacker fights with the press and the local government to get his Rangers home.  Raleigh says it happens sometimes, that Herc's reading too much into it, that Yancy likes to take some time for himself now and then.  
   
"He won't say so," Raleigh tells them with a shrug, down by the pool, which is all theirs right now, "but he carries a lot on his shoulders.  More than he needs to.  I'd help him with it, but," and he just shrugs again.  "He's fine.  Just needs the time to himself.  Not like he's going to starve to death or anything."  
   
Raleigh's also not as comfortable with it as he pretends he is, Herc can't help but notice, and lets the boy stay with them, instead of leaving him all by him lonesome in the penthouse the hotel's lent out to the Becket brothers.   
   
It's nice, real nice, having him around.  He's all sweet seduction where Chuck is raging passion and Yancy fiercely-tight control.  He's the one who wakes Herc up with gentle kissing as Chuck eagerly mouths at his dick, the one who takes the soap away in the shower and whispers _let me_ as Chuck closes his eyes and tips his head back so Daddy can wash out the shampoo.  He keeps Chuck calm and Chuck gets Raleigh wound up, and by day two, Raleigh's calling him Daddy as well.  
   
Herc would be hard-press to find a better way to introduce himself, properly introduce himself, to the joys of gay sex than spending a lazy week with a couple of young, virile, gorgeous incubi.  
   
But it's still not quite right.   
   
Cause Yancy doesn't return.  
   
Herc never does find out when the elder Becket comes back to the hotel.  
   
Herc does know when Yancy's leaving, though.  Spots them and their security detail on the way out, the morning the jaegers finally have clearance to leave. But where Raleigh looks like the cat that got the cream, Yancy looks like shit. For all Raleigh's confidence that his older brother can take care of himself just fine, doesn't look like Yancy’s eaten in days.  Gray and gaunt.  It's terrible.

And before he can even give himself permission to do it, Herc’s walking towards him.

Grabs him by the arm.

Shoves him back into an alcove that still has pay phones - of all the damn things - and kisses him.

Hard.  
   
 Yancy stares at him for a moment, after Herc pulls back. Like the world’s ending.

“Baby boy,” Herc murmurs, rubbing his shoulder, trying to wipe that expression away. “I was so worried about you.”

The incubus’ lips open and shut, and then Yancy’s shaking his head, stepping back. Herc does not understand the stilted body language, not at all. Yancy’s been trying to get in his pants pretty much from the moment they met. Hadn’t their night together been good? What happened? 

"If this is about what you and I talked about... it, umm, it helped me a lot, and I don't know how to tha..."  
   
"Look, Herc, Gipsy's leaving and we need to be on the jumphawk, like, thirty minutes ago.  Can this wait?"  
   
Herc pulls back a bit, stung.  “I’m not the one who took off after the first round, mate.”  
   
"You asked me to fuck you, I fucked you, end of story.  Don't take it any further than it needs to be taken."  
   
Yancy tries to walk away, but Herc catches his arm, pulls him back.  "What if I want to take it further?  What if I'd like to do this week again, but with you around too this time?”  
   
That actually gets Yancy baring his teeth, an angry hiss that makes Herc drop his hand in surprise.  “We’re not going to do this, Herc.”  
   
"Yance..."  
   
“I am happy for you, that you figured it out, that you and Chuck are okay. But I’m too far away for you to put me on your booty call list. You're not my lover, you're not my brother, and you're sure as fuck not my daddy.” Yancy accentuates the titles with a jab of his finger in Herc’s chest.  “I don't owe you anything more than what I've already given you, okay?  So stay the fuck away from me and my family."  
   
Herc bristles, because worry aside, it's still infuriating.  "I thought you said Chuck was family."  
   
"If Raleigh wants to talk to Chuck, that's on him.  I just think it's best you and me don't see each other again."  
   
He folds his arms.  "Give me a reason."  
   
Yancy's eyes are flinty in the shadows, and for a moment, it looks like he's going to snap.  Say something. Explain this.

But all he does is lay his hands on Herc’s biceps, leveraging himself up for one more kiss, one more brush of Herc’s cheek, and then he’s walking away again.

This time, Herc lets him go.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Raleigh and Yancy and the fallout. I think it wasn't clear in the story exactly what Yancy did... heh.

"Herc seems different."  
   
It's the first thing Raleigh tries to say to his brother.  The first thing, since Yancy dragged back in that morning around ten, wearing yet another stranger's face, slamming the bathroom door in Raleigh’s face without so much as a word about where he’d been or why the fuck he’d been doing it.  Raleigh can guess, though, and not just because of the disturbing flashes he’s gotten through the drift. Yance smells like self-loathing and sadism, of old hurt and fresh bruises. It’s the scent of a street hooker, something not even incubi aspire to being. If a guy like Herc is a great microbrew, sex out there is bathtub hooch.

Essentially, his brother’s been on a five day bender.

Raleigh hasn't been an asshole about it - in fact, he’s tried to be his usual accommodating self. Give his brother room. Hell, he didn’t even go back to Herc and Chuck’s room for one last goodbye fuck, even though he really wanted to, just in case Yancy needed him.

But Yancy hasn't talked to him.

So Raleigh hasn’t tried to say anything.

Not until now.  
   
Sitting across from his brother in the jumphawk's small, soundproofed passenger cabin, two hours out from Manila and sick of the silence.

Yancy’s eyes harden and then look away, in that way they do when he doesn’t want to talk, but fuck what he needs right now, as far as Raleigh’s concerned. “Yeah, kiddo, I guess he's different."

“I saw some stuff, stuff I didn’t see last time,” Raleigh continues, needing to know. “Teenage Herc, making out with another boy in his bedroom... but you’re the first guy he slept with. We are. Aren’t we?”

“Raleigh.”

"What'd you do to him?"

The answer is a long time coming.  
   
"I did what he needed me to do."  
   
"That's not an answer."  
   
"Rals..."  
   
"I know you think of me as a little kid," Raleigh snaps, "and maybe that's my fault for... the way I like myself, the trap thing...”

Yancy groans. "Kiddo..."  
   
"...but I'm not a child, Yance, and I'm not weak, and I'm your brother.  So fucking tell me.  What did you do to Herc?"

Anxiety ghosts out of Yancy as he sits there, stoic though he is. He’s worried. Worried about how he can put this into words. Worried Raleigh’s going to hate him for it.

Raleigh leans forward. “Yance, I could never...”

“I changed his orientation.”

What? Yancy’s upset about that? Herc was great this week, so happy, loving every second of it. He was free, like he never has been. He’s free now. How can that be a bad thing? And Raleigh frowns.  “What the fuck, Yance?  We do that all the time when we eat. Why are you...”  
   
"Temporarily," Yancy corrects.  "We can override a human's higher sense of self, _temporarily_ , with the promise of immediate, base satisfaction."  
   
"Then we make 'em forget," Raleigh agrees.  "But like you always say, like with the Gages, you can fuck 'em up if you don't make them forget..."  
   
"I made Herc remember," Yancy says softly, and his eyes are on the floor.  "I made him remember wrong.  Changed his entire past."  Raleigh doesn't say anything, and the shame's a pressure in Yancy's chest that just forces it all out.  "I changed the memory of his first kiss, and who he had crushes on in high school and when he got his first blow job, and... and I made him forget how much he adored his wife and her body and why he felt ashamed when Chuck turned into one of us and... I took his life away, Raleigh.  I took it all away and twisted it up into this miserably logical self-hating thing and he thanked me, thanked me with tears in his eyes and then he was trying.. today in the hotel... I liked him, you know?  He’s the kind of guy you could fall in love with, the dad we should have had, and I... I betrayed him. I betrayed his trust.”

Raleigh just sits back in his seat, breathing out. Very slowly.

Trying to figure this out. 

“It doesn’t matter, right? Orientation? It’s just some stupid human thing.”

“Yeah, a stupid thing,” Yancy repeats, more heated, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “But it goes so deep and it was so important to him, especially since Chuck... his entire life, Raleigh. Fuck, it felt like killing him.”

It occurs to Raleigh, in that moment, that Mom talked about this a few times, with them, when she was sick.

Mom had said never to fuck with the old magics, never push a glamour too far. She said it wouldn’t work, that all those old stories about incubi twisting humans into their personal sex slaves or whatever were all bullshit, not to even try, that it was impossible to fuck with a human that thoroughly and deeply.

And Yancy told him the same thing.

Once.

“Wait, when Daddy left, that you couldn't, that there was no way, that you... you... you couldn’t, it was impossible!” Raleigh says in disbelief.   
   
"Rals..."  
   
"You could have made him stay though, right?  You could have made him love us again!"  
   
"No, you gotta know that, I couldn't..."  
   
"You do it for Chuck, but you didn’t do it for...”

“I did!” Yancy half-yells, the force of his anger ricocheting out into the drift; an explosion that dies all to quickly, and his brother sags in on himself. “I tried. I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it for us. I couldn’t...”

Raleigh doesn’t know what to say to that.

Yancy looks like he’s about to start crying, or something horrific like that, and Raleigh shuts up. Pulls his shirt off. Slides across the space between them, into the seat next to his brother, and pushes up the arm rest so he can settle himself into Yancy’s lap. He drapes his arms around Yancy’s neck, fingers teasing at the collar of the ancient polo Yancy is wearing, and hugs him tight.

“I love you,” he whispers in his big brother’s ear, and kisses the side of his neck. “I’ll always love you. I don’t need our daddy back. Just stay with me, Yance. Please.”

Yancy’s big strong lovely body shudders underneath him.

But Yancy kisses him anyway.

So Raleigh figures this can’t be that bad.


End file.
